The Shabaḥ of World Literature: Bedouin Cartographies in Abdulrahman Munif's Cities of Salt

Karim Mattar is assistant professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research and teaching interests include Middle Eastern literatures in English, Palestinian literature and culture, the global novel, postcolonial and world literature theory, critical theory (especially Marxism), and modernism. His work charts a post-Saidian world literary landscape where the political, religious, and gender ideologies that undergird conflict between “occidental” and “oriental” cultures both determine literary circulation, and are mediated through form. His essays have appeared in Interventions, the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Translation and Literature, and elsewhere, and his co-edited special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing on “The Global Checkpoint” came out in early 2014. He is currently at work on a book manuscript titled The Middle Eastern Novel in English: Literary Transnationalism after Orientalism, as well as a co-edited volume on The Postcolonial Middle East.